> So, when AV1 becomes more popular and starts really showing up in silicon (which Google is putting huge pressure on silicon vendors for), almost everyone will have a hardware AVIF decoder for free, should they choose to use it. If that happens, any decoding speed advantages that JXL has could be blown apart very quickly.
No one has any plans to decode AVIF still images in hardware. There are two problems. The subset of AV1 supported by hardware is much narrower than what is in practice used in AVIF images. Such images cannot be decoded by hardware. Second is that it actually doesn't get you any speed. Each image would need to be shuffled to the GPU, decoded, then sent back because browsers aren't really set up right for doing everything on the GPU. And any non-stateless HW decoder would be problematic, since every single image would need to reconfigure the decoder state, which is slow.